From lojbanlists@wonderclown.com Fri Jan 04 06:55:02 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: randy@wonderclown.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 4 Jan 2002 14:55:01 -0000 Received: (qmail 15872 invoked from network); 4 Jan 2002 14:55:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.171) by m8.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 4 Jan 2002 14:55:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO Mail6.nc.rr.com) (24.93.67.53) by mta3.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 4 Jan 2002 14:55:01 -0000 Received: from aerosol ([24.162.238.42]) by Mail6.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Fri, 4 Jan 2002 09:54:46 -0500 Received: from rnortman by aerosol with local (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 16MVk6-0000RL-00; Fri, 04 Jan 2002 09:54:46 -0500 Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 09:54:46 -0500 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Cc: buzzwyrd Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban Text to Speech Message-ID: <20020104145445.GA1650@aerosol> References: <20020104015851.GA545@aerosol> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.24i Sender: Randall Nortman Return-Path: randy@wonderclown.com From: "randl. nortmn." X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=91794573 X-Yahoo-Profile: uyndrklaun On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 05:18:11AM -0000, buzzwyrd wrote: [...] > So I gave that up in disgust for a while, until the idea struck me > over the Thanksgiving holiday: Why not at least try to fake it with > alreadly available synthetic voices? So when I returned home, I > decided on Festival's kal_diphone (US male voice) mixed with a little > of their el_diphone (Spanish male voice). The Spanish voice provides > the much prized Lojban x diphone--the Spanish j in juan, of course, > and I think only about 50 diphones came from that voice. [...] I suppose that works to just cobble something together. Still, though, it will do nobody any good to be learning Lojban from a voice of this quality; we'll all sound horrible the first time we actually try to speak to another human. ;-) Which underscores the fact that it would be really nice to have a high-quality, Lojban-specific set of diphone recordings, which some kind folks in Brussels have recently volunteered to do. If you can get your diphone list to them and give them a hand in figuring out what to do, since you tried it once already, it might make things easier for them. And you have confirmed that you've already done all the work that I volunteered to do! > The combination of phonemes fills the slate, and theoretically > within Lojban phonemic pronunciation parameters. Although most of > the r's are untrilled (but for a few that slipped in from Spanish. > However, this enabled me not to have to feel guilty much about > giving short shrift to r as a syllabic consonant.) [...] A few notes here. First, English vowels (esp. American English) are very different from Lojban vowels, and for that matter from most other languages. English vowels are not pure vowel sounds, but slide from one vowel to another, as in a dipthong. Lojban vowels are pure, crisp, and short. Hard to communicate the distinction in text, I suppose. The Lojban 'r' is allowed to be pronounced in just about any way, including the standard American untrilled 'r'. I happen to think that Lojban sounds best with an Irish sort of 'r', but that could just be because I love listening to Irish accents. ;-) I would advise against the French "r", as that seems indistinguishable from "xr", at least to my ear. Lastly, unless I'm mistaken, you should be able to get "r" as a syllabic consonant from an English voice just by using the "er" sound, as in "better" (which would be "betr" in Lojban). mu'omi'e randl.